In discussions of Britain’s economy the contribution of farming, now down to 0.5% of GDP, is treated with contempt. Left to the market, it is assumed that UK farming would disappear altogether. But there is something deeply obscene and almost suicidal about this attitude. Statistics can lie but here’s one that doesn’t: precisely 100% of the British people eat. So in a world in which global food supplies are now seriously at risk from climate change and Britain’s parlous balance of payments (-£15bn in foodstuffs alone), is about to get worse as the bloated financial service sector shrinks, shouldn’t the contribution of farming to the wellbeing of the country be evaluated on a different scale to this tyrannous yardstick of GDP? Louis MacNeice wrote as long ago as the '30s that the countryside was “a dwindling annexe to the town, squalid as an afterbirth”. Well, farming may be dirty but that’s life. How can these precious, fastidious townees live except by food?

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I'm a writer whose interests include the biological revolution happening now, the relationship between art and science, jazz, and the state of the planet